The Life Of W M Thackeray Author:Herman Merivale, Frank T. Marzials Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. (By Herman Merivale.) " T N 1336 there was a John de Thakwra who held JL of the Abbot of St. Mary of Fountains a dwelling- house and thirty acres... more » of land at Hartwich. In 1361, William de Thackwra was tenant at will of a messuage and twenty-one acres at the same place. A century afterwards Robert Thackra was residing in the same vicinity, and kept the Grange of Brimham for the convent, where he was occasionally visited by Abbot Green- well. Subsequently an Edward Thacquarye held houses and land from the same convent." So run some family records which the kindness of the great writer's representatives has lent me to cull from: and there is something in these beginnings that one loves to read. A great man's works are his own best pedigree, but genealogies have for most of us a charm of their own. I like to trace the quaint mutations of spelling— the evolution of a Thackeray from a de Thakwra, wondering the while how de Thakwra was pronounced, and of what race he was derived. I like to know that Abbot Greenwell sometimes called on Robert Thackra, albeit I know not who Abbot Greenwell was. The card of the parish-parson is a certificate of good character and of polite worth, and I am sure that Thackra felt it. " Ours," wrote one fair relative of the novelist to another, " was indeed a most remarkable family, and I feel proud of all our dear old relatives. They were so handsome and so good." One likes to hear of such frank and enthusiastic faith, just one of those gracious little weaknesses on which Thackeray himself would have loved to dwell. How pleasantly and wanderingly Mr. Roundabout would have egoized round such a text. For I deny the name of egotist to him or to Montaigne, in spite of his own argument. " I should like to touch you sometimes with a reminisc...« less